Sound of Madness
by Sunlight through Leaves
Summary: Iruka kept hearing things in his new apartment, but he chalked it up to gravity and random air currents. He didn't expect to be saddled with a postmortem roommate.


_**Summary:**__ Iruka kept hearing things in his new apartment, but he chalked it up to gravity and random air currents. He didn't expect to be saddled with a postmortem roommate.  
__**Rating:**__ T  
__**Genre:**__ Romance/Humor, Modern AU  
__**AN:**__ Written for the Pick-A-Number game at the Deviantart Kakairu Group for #20 prompt: "The Sound of madness" from MoiyaHatake. I hope you like it! Thanks to Kiterie for beta-ing._

_EDIT! Sorry folks. I have no idea what happened when I uploaded this - that's never happened before. Thanks for the heads up. It's fixed now._

OOOOOOOOO

_Paper._ The soft rustlings of paper on paper dragged him up and out of a dreamless slumber. Iruka made a half-hearted grab for the stack of exams and managed to knock half of them off the edge of the table. Each exam was thick, much to his student's – and his own, once he'd started to grade them – dismay, and the raucous noise of those hitting the floor was significantly different than what woke him. He lifted his head blearily from where it had been nestled in the crook of his arm between the partially graded stacks of papers.

As he sat up, the sound of paper teased across the edge of his hearing. He glared at the exams, which remained pointedly motionless, and checked his watch. Five minutes to three in the morning. He groaned, but the noise didn't quite cover up another rustle. He whirled around, almost upsetting the table. _That_ was definitely behind him, and not a single piece of paper on the table had so much as wavered.

It was really too late to trust his ears. He knew that, and he kept telling himself that he was being absurdly silly, but that didn't stop him from slowly unfolding into a crouched position, grabbing the broom from where he'd left it in the corner of the room.

It was not the first time he'd heard these noises. They'd been prevalent since he'd moved in a week ago, but his house had been full of loose books and papers – the hazards of being a teacher – and he'd just chalked it up to gravity. This was the first time he'd ever felt the need to investigate. He blamed his lack of self-preservation on the late hour.

As he hugged the wall just inside the living room and brandished the broom handle, he breathed a brief sigh of relief that he was still unpacking and cleaning and hadn't gotten around to putting the broom back in the closet at the end of the hall where it belonged. In the hallway, the pages continued to scuff past each other.

He took a steadying, loin-girding breath, stepped into the hall, and turned towards his front door. Noises in his apartment probably meant a break-in, and he could only hope that they hadn't gotten too far. Even though his heart lodged solidly in his throat, there was nothing in the hallway save for him and one box that had vomited its contents across the floor.

Iruka tightened his grip on the broom. He had _definitely_ heard something - he knew he'd heard something – and that part of the hallway was blissfully deserted, which could only mean one thing.

Someone was behind him. He could feel the prickle of hair rising across the back of his neck. The broom offered meager solace, but he clutched it close, readying it to swing, and turned.

Fear of the darkness is genetically encoded into the human brain. We expect things to go bump in the night because that's when the carnivores are active. Any person walking through their apartment in the dark will think there is something behind them even if they _know_ that there is nothing there.

Even so, no one will actually expect to see anything.

No matter what sounds he'd heard, Iruka thought that peering down the hallway would alleviate his fears. He was dead wrong.

A man stood at the far end of the hallway, facing the wall. The light was on in Iruka's bedroom off to the man's left, and it highlighted the nonchalant form and threw a shadow up against the closed closet door on his right. One hand was stuffed into his pocket, and his other hand was hidden behind his body, but the shadow showed a rectangular bulk that was recognizably a book flipped open in one hand. He stood motionless for a second, and then raised a hand to idly turn the page. The swish of the paper was unmistakable.

The twin impulses of fight and flight warred within Iruka for a heartbeat before fight won triumphantly, and he sprinted forward, swinging the broom as forcefully as he could given the narrow hallway. It met no resistance until it hit the opposite wall. The shock vibrated down the handle, and his fingers let loose of their own accord.

Fight was cowed a bit by its stunning lack of success, and flee leapt to the foreground. Iruka took two quick steps backwards and spun on his heel. _I'm losing my mind. I am_ losing _my mind._ He repeated the thought like a mantra, just hoping that it would get him as far as the living room at the front of the apartment where he'd left his cell phone under one of the piles of exams.

He almost made it.

A few feet from the doorway, an arm draped over his shoulder, hanging a bright orange book into his line of sight and sending a chill down his spine. "What," A voice drawled into his ear, "Are you doing in my apartment?"

Iruka spluttered for a moment, already working out plausible alibis before the words had sunk in. "Your...your apartment? This is my apartment."

"That's a clever one, thief. I'm impressed."

"I am not a thief!" Iruka spun around, suppressing a shudder as the arm slid through the side of his neck, and raised his chin defiantly. "This is my place. My couch. My shoes. That's a picture of my parents hanging right next to you." He folded his arms across his chest and set his body in a show of boldness driven purely by adrenaline and raised a scathing eyebrow. "Or are you insinuating that I broke in and decorated?"

An eyebrow rose to match his, and the man turned slowly to look at the picture hanging next to him. "It's not...," he trailed off.

The silence was uncomfortable, but it afforded Iruka the chance to study his visitor. Silver hair and pale skin gave off a very ghostly appearance, but he still _looked_ solid, and the worn black t-shirt and jeans offset any ghostly vibes. His hair was messy and pushed forward to hide his left eye, but didn't come down far enough to obscure the long scar that traced down the curve of his cheek. It was the most supernatural thing about him besides the fact that Iruka had put a broom through him. Iruka subconsciously raised a hand to trace his thumb over the corner of his own scar.

"It's one of my pictures," the man concluded finally, "But it's fuzzy, and I can almost make out the silhouette of two people. What have you done to my belongings?" He grabbed for the front of Iruka's shirt.

Both of them gaped down at where his arm was plunged through Iruka's chest. It felt like someone had pressed a bag of ice to his chest, and Iruka resisted the urge to sprint backwards just to get away from it. His heart was practically shivering in the cold. It was, to put it plainly, immensely uncomfortable. He reached for the man's arm before he realized that he wouldn't be able to pull it away and settled for pointing at it. "Would it be too much trouble for you to put your hand somewhere else?"

He didn't move. He just stared at his arm and then let out a cough of laughter.

"It's really uncomfortable."

"I'm sorry," he laughed the words out, smiling broadly, and pulled his arm out. "It's not every day you get to see that."

There was a correct grab bag of words for situations like this. Iruka opened his mouth and said something that wasn't a combination of any of those. "That's a relief."

He was studying his hand and still chuckling under his breath. "What?"

"Honestly? Most incorporeal things are out to eat the rest of us." The laughter was contagious. Iruka found himself smiling back. "I was kind of expecting pointed teeth."

The man's hand flew to his face, fingers spreading to cover the majority of his nose and cheeks. His one visible eye was wide in shock.

Iruka suddenly felt that he'd violated something clandestine. "What?"

"My mask."

In the very back corner of the one of the closets, Iruka had found a stash of rectangular medical masks. They wouldn't do the man any good at this point – if he could put his arm through Iruka, his face would probably go straight through the mask. "I don't think you have to worry about catching anything."

The quip seemed to fall on deaf ears. He kept his hand firmly over the lower half of his face and shifted uncomfortably under Iruka's confused stare.

He eventually dropped his eyes, consciously looking anywhere but at his guest's face. It was tough – they were almost the same height, and it was forcing Iruka to tuck his chin down to avert his eyes – but after only a few seconds, Iruka could see the tension run out of his form. He lifted his head slowly but was sure to keep his gaze focused over the man's shoulder. "What now?"

The air was contemplative for a moment, and Iruka thought that he was going to get a reasonable answer until the form at the edge of his vision spun on heel and stalked down the hallway. Iruka rocked back, staring at the back of his head until he hung a left and headed into the bedroom.

By the time he made it to the bedroom, the man was straightening up from leaning over the bed.

"What are you doing?" Iruka remembered belatedly to not look at the man's face and instead found himself staring at the ceiling.

He let out a soft chuckle of amusement. "Going to sleep."

"This is my bedroom." Wait. There was a more important question here. "How are you even planning on laying down?"

"This is _my_ bedroom." He said the words like they should explain everything.

Perhaps they did. Iruka hadn't been able to interact physically with the man, but he'd still walked through the apartment. If he couldn't interact with the building at all, shouldn't he just fall through the floor? "Does it still look like your room?" The surroundings were real to him because they were his.

"Only if I don't look too closely."

A rustle of cloth drew Iruka's attention, and he looked down in time to see his guest thumb open the button on his jeans and drop them to the floor. "You can't be serious." The shirt remained on, thankfully, but at the sight of the man sitting on the edge of the bed and patting the mattress, his hackles went even farther up. "Can't you sleep on the couch?" He yelped, briefly forgetting the ban on looking the man in the face in favor of glaring sternly at him.

"I don't have a couch." He tipped his head down and winked broadly at Iruka from under the spray of hair. "You've already let me into your bedroom, thief. Now's not the time to get shy about sharing a bed."

"Iruka!" He snapped. "My name is Iruka." He waited, gaze flicking uncomfortably from bed to window to wall to the pile of clothes he hadn't gotten around to putting away yet, but no name was forthcoming. "Are you going to introduce yourself?"

"I can't remember."

Iruka could hear the bone-deep loneliness in his tone – he was no stranger to it – and he caved, slumping dejectedly onto the bed before he even made a conscious decision. Discovering that you were dead couldn't be easy. Iruka wasn't sure that he could handle being alone after that, and he couldn't bring himself to leave. The air at his back was chilled slightly by the man's presence, and it took him a very long time to fall asleep.

Getting doused by cold water was an extraordinarily rude way to wake up. Iruka hissed and flailed as his brain tried to catch up. For one insane moment, he thought someone had tossed a bucket of ice across his chest and groin. He was already cursing Naruto before his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could make out where the man's arm and leg were thrown through him. He slid as far over as he could get before dragging the blanket to the floor with him.

A postmortem roommate might be able to hog the bed for the sole reason that Iruka couldn't push him away, but he'd be damned if he was going to let him hog the covers.

OOOOOOOOOOOOO

The discomfort wrought from sleeping on the floor dragged him out of a sound sleep more effectively than his alarm clock. Iruka groaned, stretched, and rubbed at the imprints on his face before crawling slowly into a seated position and stretching abused muscles. The fog brought on too little sleep over too many days made him forget, for a moment, the strange happenings in his apartment, but the memories shouldered their way through and happily dropped into his consciousness. Iruka froze in the middle of the rubbing sleep from the corners of his eyes.

A ghost. There had been a ghost in his house.

He could easily confirm it simply by turning around and looking at his bed, but he couldn't quite make himself do it. If the bed was empty, as he was certain it would be, he could chalk it all up to sleep deprivation and an overactive imagination, but if not, he wasn't sure what he would do.

Probably sign into the nearest psychiatric facility.

He shoved the blanket away to free his feet, and stood slowly. The floorboards were mercifully quiet, and Iruka beat a hasty retreat out of the room. The trip from bedroom to kitchen seemed excruciatingly long, especially because he kept checking over his shoulder, half expecting something to appear behind him.

Nothing did. He slowly opened one of the cabinets, pulled out a box of tea, and stared at it for a long moment. His mind turned but didn't really catch on anything until his front door slammed open with a raucous clatter. The noise startled him into dropping the box, bags of tea spilling out of the counter.

"Iruka-sensei!" The familiar voice drew out the words loudly enough that they almost covered the noise of a heavy backpack hitting the floor.

_Naruto._ Iruka forced his muscles to relax. _It's just Naruto. He's come here every morning since you've moved. You give him a ride. Normal. Perfectly normal._ He quickly scooped the scattered tea back into the box and turned.

He really shouldn't have bothered. He dropped the box the minute he turned, scattering its contents again.

The man was standing in the doorway, staring blankly at Iruka. He tilted his head down and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I'd really hoped it was a dream."

Iruka had been gripping the counter with white knuckles to keep himself both upright and from screaming – there was nothing like being confronted with a ghost in the cold light of day – but his heart sank at that comment. He'd hoped it was a dream as well, but it was no skin off his nose if it wasn't. He offered the only thing he could. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry, Iruka-sensei?" Naruto skidded into the doorway and straight through the man standing there. "For what?"

All Iruka could do was stare. _I'm going mad._

"What?"

"Naruto, did you...?" There really was no good way to ask if someone else saw a ghost. He settled for, "Did you feel anything?"

Naruto twisted around and gaped at the doorway and its occupant. "Like what?"

He looked too – he couldn't help it – and met the man's eyes. Iruka raised an eyebrow at him but received nothing but a shrug in return. "It's nothing. I've been chasing a draft for the last few days." He stepped far enough forward to clap a hand on Naruto's shoulder and announced to the room at large, "We're headed to school."

"Yeah!" He sprinted towards the door.

The doorway was thankfully unobstructed. The man had straightened and stepped back just in time to avoid getting run through.

"I'll be back this afternoon," Iruka murmured once Naruto was out of earshot.

"We're gonna be late!"

The voice rang out from the door, and Iruka offered his guest a half smile before beating a hasty retreat.

School was entertaining – it always was. Iruka thoroughly enjoyed teaching, and it made the day fly by. It was a good thing, in the long run. Had he had a chance to breathe, let alone think, during the classes, his mind would have settled on the specter haunting his apartment. Not because he was afraid, but because he was worried. He had no idea what the sudden reality of death would do to his guest, but he knew, as he'd known last night, that he shouldn't be left alone.

Lunch was terrible. He was trapped in his office finishing the grading he hadn't completed last night. Even though it should have been thoroughly distracting, his thoughts kept cycling back. After fifteen minutes, he tossed the exam away and buried his face in his hands, carding his fingers back through the strands that had worked their way free during the morning. Insanity was unlikely, or he'd be seeing the man everywhere.

The school, however, was free of any ghosts that Iruka could see.

On the other hand, had they been able to interact, he would have fallen over the man when he got home.

He was leaning against the wall with the orange book flipped open across his thigh. He tilted his head back.

His eyes met Iruka's for just a second before Iruka remembered the strange encounter last night and averted his eyes. Even though he wasn't looking, Iruka could swear he could feel the man smile.

"Welcome back."

"Don't you mean 'Welcome home?'" He wasn't sure what it was, but something about this man brought out the side of him that he usually kept under wraps, the one that was just dying to talk back.

Perhaps 'dying' was an insensitive way to think about it.

"Not your home unless our relationship has taken a step forward, Iruka."

The statement hung in the air while Iruka waited for the proper conclusion only to realize that it wasn't coming. He aimed a baleful stare at the man and slowly raised an eyebrow in indignation - a trick he'd found worked exceptionally well to shame his students into the proper behavior.

It was met with an unexpected reaction. The man's lips twitched into a smirk, and the silence stretched out until it was almost unbearable before he finally finished, "-san."

"You're the one who's moved into my apartment, Shiro-san. Seems like you're trying to push the relationship forward."

He seemed to ignore the jab at the end. "Shiro-san?"

Iruka had the good grace to blush. "Creepy white-haired ghost sounded really rude in my head when I was thinking about it at lunch today, so I thought I'd come up with something better," he paused and then stepped over Shiro's legs in order to get out of the doorway before calling over his shoulder and conceding, "Less rude."

There was a scramble of feet on the floor behind him. "How, exactly, do we know that you're not the ghost?"

"I interact with people!"

"It could be all in your head."

"You don't interact with anyone."

"I've always been a loner."

"How can you remember that? You can't even remember your name!"

"Maybe not." Shiro leaned over his shoulder, peered into the plastic bag he was carrying, and pointed at the box sticking out of the top. "But I do remember that I love brownies. That's equally important and certainly good for personal identification."

"That is not, " Iruka spluttered, "Everybody does!"

"Are you making those tonight?"

Of course he was. He didn't have the self-control to buy a box of brownie mix and not make it. Between the exam and the ghost in his apartment, he'd earned it. That, however, was not the point. "You're not going to be able to eat them."

It turned out to be true, but that didn't stop Shiro from hovering over his shoulder the entire time he was cooking dinner or from offering less-than-helpful suggestions on the brownies – including that he set the oven 50 degrees hotter so that it would cook faster.

"Are you even human?"

"I could be a demon."

"A demon wouldn't insist that the way I chop cabbage is inefficient and improper."

Shiro opened his mouth, clearly intending to reopen that argument.

Very few things could stymie an argument, but Iruka found that pointedly turning your back on someone was pretty effective. He heard Shiro splutter a couple of syllables and fall silent and grinned.

Open space in the apartment was limited, and they quickly discovered that Iruka's and Shiro's tables were located in the same spot. Even though he couldn't eat anything, Shiro sat down on the far side of the table and kicked his legs out under it.

After a few minutes, Iruka put his fork down. Ghosts he could tolerate, but ones that floated in the center of his kitchen he couldn't. He maneuvered the extra chair until it was under Shiro, huffed in satisfaction, and returned to his food.

"Was that really necessary?"

"Yes," Iruka muttered out around a bite of food.

It had been a long time since Iruka had a roommate. He'd been younger at the time, but it hadn't worked out very well. They'd come to a tacit agreement to avoid each other and hadn't said two words to each other over almost the entire year.

Living with Shiro was remarkably different, and it wasn't just because, after the first night, Iruka slept on the couch in his own apartment. They bickered and argued about the most nonsensical things. They ate breakfast and dinner together.

Shiro couldn't physically help, of course, but he was a constant and entertaining presence – he teased Iruka for several days for a couple of choice pairs of geeky underwear after supervising the laundry. On nights that Iruka had to grade, which happened more often than not, he found himself a spot on the floor beside the coffee table and read silently, save for the soft whisper of pages on pages.

OOOOOOOOOO

The first few nights, he'd woken up with a massive crick in his neck. His couch was not designed for sleeping on, but Iruka was resourceful, and he eventually managed to build a reasonably comfortable nest out of cushions and two appropriated pillows.

It's not as if Shiro was using them, after all.

Now, several weeks into the strange relationship, his alarm roused him from a sound and restful sleep, and Iruka stretched, batting loose strands of hair out of his face. He knew from experience that he was probably being watched.

Being dead probably significantly reduced the amount of sleep needed, because ever since that first night, Shiro was awake before him. For some unknown reason, Shiro routinely took up position at the end of the couch, staring Iruka down until he woke. Despite Iruka's best efforts, he seemed unable to see just how disturbing his actions were.

Iruka scrunched his eyes shut. It was a weekend, and therefore one of the few blissful days when he could afford to sleep in. He was determined to enjoy it right up until the feather-light brush of freezing air on the tip of his nose. "Alright," he waved his hands ineffectively, intermittently breaking into pockets of frigid air. "Alright, I'm up."

By the time Iruka opened his eyes, straightened up, and located something to pull his hair out of his face, Shiro had retreated to the doorway, lounging against it. He seemed to have no qualms with being in Iruka's space when they were relatively stationary, but they'd found out quickly that when either of them was on the move, it was easier to give a wide berth. One too many awkward body parts had passed through another awkward body part.

Iruka shoved himself to his feet and took one step towards the door before Shiro doubled over with a pained groan. "Shiro-san?"

His body trembled, and it looked like he was struggling just to breathe. "Something's wrong." He dropped to his knees, hand braced on the floor in front of him, and choked down a scream of pain. His hand clawed ineffectively at the front of his shirt.

Iruka reached for him, unthinking, and bit out a curse when his hand encountered nothing but air. He knelt on the floor beside him, murmuring empty reassurances – how could he help someone who not only didn't belong to Iruka's world but was already dead?

With a pop of displaced air, Shiro vanished.

"Shiro-san?" His feet slipped on the floor, but Iruka managed to haul himself upright, looking wildly around the room only to be met by empty corners. "Shiro-san!"

The rest of the apartment was just as deserted. It was not enormous, and there was hardly any place that Shiro could hide in. After opening every single closet and cupboard, regardless of size, Iruka retreated to the living room and sank onto the couch with the realization that he was well and truly alone in the apartment for the first time in weeks.

He never would have predicted that he would live in a haunted apartment, but he definitely would not have believed that he would miss the ghost.

Days passed, and Iruka rattled around the empty apartment. It took him almost a full twelve hours to realize that he was talking to himself as if Shiro was still there.

School was a blissful relief up until the point when he returned home late and cracked the door open and waited for the shout of welcome. He'd never been able to figure out what Shiro was doing deeper in the apartment, but save from that first day, he'd never met him at the door. Iruka pulled the door shut, feeling more alone than he had since he'd lost his parents, and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. He looked down at where his hand was draped over his knee and wondered how many adult books there were out there with an orange cover. He might not actually read it, but it would be comforting just to see it sitting around.

That thought was pathetic and depressing enough that he grimaced and pried himself off the floor. He'd half-listened to Naruto blather about a new movie the entire ride in. It was a tempting alternative to moping around his apartment, even though it meant that he'd be spending his night with his former student turned surrogate son.

He'd just started the search for his cellphone when someone hammered on his front door. _Speak of the devil._ He thumbed through the movie show times as he headed for the door. He was still peering at the screen when he pulled it open, "Are you interested in seeing that movie at 8?" The invitation was less than gleeful, and Iruka swallowed, trying to force himself to put on a brighter smile.

Naruto tended to turn into a perceptive snot at the most inopportune times, and there was no sane explanation for the fact that Iruka's apartment was missing a ghost.

"I don't think I could manage to say no to that long face."

It was definitely confusing to see him with a backdrop of trees, sky, and other people. Iruka fumbled for a minute before finally blurting out, "You... You're outside. How are you outside?" He didn't even wait for Shiro to answer, indignation overriding any politeness. "Where have you been! I've been worried sick."

Shiro stepped through the door, hesitating only briefly to allow Iruka to step back – a natural habit of avoiding passing through each other. He cocked his head to one side, eyes crinkling. "You were worried about me?"

"Did you think I was just going to ignore the fact that my apartment was minus a person?" Iruka huffed back in an effort to use brusqueness to cover embarrassment and dropped his eyes to avoid Shiro's face. After a minute, he realized he was standing in the hallway alone. For one sinking moment, he worried that Shiro had disappeared again. "Shiro-san?"

"Kakashi." A voice called from his kitchen.

"I'm sorry?"

He leaned out of the doorway. "My name's Kakashi."

"You remembered?" It was probably progress, but Iruka couldn't put his finger on what it meant. He also realized that Shir - Kakashi, he corrected himself – was wearing a medical mask like the ones Iruka had found in the closet. Something had happened. Iruka followed Kakashi into the kitchen. All of his questions vanished when he turned the corner.

Kakashi was standing in front of his fridge, one hand draped over the handle of the open door. After a brief perusal of the contents, he pulled out a tupperware container, cracked the lid, and hummed approval. "I'm so glad you made this again." He reached past Iruka to unerringly pull out a plate and fork out of a cupboard before spooning out some of the food and tossing it into the microwave.

"What are you doing?" It wasn't what he wanted to ask, but it was the only question he could seem to get out of his mouth.

"Eating something." Kakashi lounged against the edge of the counter. "I've had nothing but hospital food for the last week, and I've had to watch you make this stuff for the last month without getting a chance to try it. Pure torture, Iruka-san."

"Eating? Ghosts don't eat." Iruka tilted his head to one side and squinted at him. The gears in his mind were starting to mesh and turn.

"No."

He reached out, hesitated, and reached out again, starting when his hand connected squarely with the center of Kakashi's chest and didn't push through. "You're alive."

"Yes."

"You were dead, though, right?" Even though he knew it was incredibly rude, Iruka poked him in the chest. He still wasn't sure he believed it, but he knew that Kakashi had been incorporeal. He was sure of that.

"Coma, actually." Kakashi lowered his gaze. "There was an accident, and I was badly injured. They patched me up as best they could, but my body needed time. I didn't even remember what had happened. I woke up in my apartment and thought everything was normal." His eyes flicked up and he grinned wickedly, "Until you assaulted me, that is."

The microwave dinged between them. They ignored it.

"I thought you'd broken into my apartment." It was an old argument, but Iruka wasn't about to stop defending himself. That did not, however, stop him from grinning back. He'd missed even these little things. It was hard to believe how quickly Kakashi had wormed his way into Iruka's life. "Last week?"

He shrugged. "I woke up and then they kept me for observation. None of the doctors are entirely certain why – maybe my body finally healed enough, maybe..." He trailed off.

"Maybe subconsciously you wanted to harass me in person?"

"I wouldn't say _harass_."

Iruka peered at him. A thought crossed his mind. "You were waking me up. That was pretty effective when you were a ghost. Being alive wouldn't improve that."

Kakashi blinked at him, reached towards him and past him, and pulled out a second plate. He pushed it into Iruka's hands and then popped open the microwave.

The sudden appearance of a plate in his hands effectively ended Iruka's line of thought. He stared stupidly at it before fumbling with the drawer behind him to grab a second set of silverware, bumping it shut with his hip, and hustling after Kakashi to the table.

They settled at the table like they had so many times before, but, this time, Kakashi spooned out a hefty portion to his own plate, stabbed it, and then paused. "Maybe," he admitted slowly, "Subconsciously, I wanted something like this."

Maybe Iruka wanted something like this too; he just never expected to find it in such a roundabout way. Hopefully he'd never have to explain it – no one would ever believe him.

At the end of the night, Kakashi headed for the bedroom as if he belonged there. To be fair, he had belonged there for several weeks of their lives, but the absence had been long enough to remind Iruka that, although his couch was serviceable, it had nothing on his bed.

"Where are you going?" He voiced his protest before he'd actually thought about it. It was a natural action, given their past, but Iruka was loathe to give up his comfortable mattress and pillows. He was at least going to put up a fight.

"You already let me in to your bedroom." Kakashi drawled. "It's a little late to protest now."

_I must be losing my mind._ Iruka thought but followed. It wasn't as if he would be doused by cold ghost in the middle of the night.

He was woken up in the middle of the night, but it was from wandering hands instead. The 'I've been in a coma' excuse was original - Iruka would give him that - but he didn't buy it for a second.

OOOOOOOOO

Hope you enjoy this! I had much fun writing it.


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